Face
by shelter
Summary: Short story. He can't remember Clare's face. He isn't sure what Isley's doing. And then there's Priscilla. And so the time comes for Raki to make a choice - Isley or Priscilla?
1. White

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**FACE**

_A Claymore Short Story_

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><p>DISCLAIMER: Claymore &amp; its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi &amp; his affiliates.<p>

RATING: T

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><p><em>For Fatehah.<em> Whose face I struggle to remember.

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><p><em>"I look inside myself and see my heart is black."<em>

- _Paint It Black,_ **The Rolling Stones**

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**PART ONE - White**

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**1.**

He reaches town in the evening, goes into the tavern like they agreed. There, he finds Isley seated at a table with his sword on the table and a harlot named Ailsa on his arm.

Outside, he sees the sun taking cover behind the bulky shoulders of mountains. As the town prepares for night, residents barricade their gates. Young boys usher their animals inside. Several stragglers retire to the tavern. He had slipped past everyone, the night watchmen taking their positions behind him.

Briefly stunned by sour pressing stench of so many people in such an enclosed space, he takes a seat opposite his good friend. The harlot joins him. She isn't from this town, but says the men here are bigger, give better and can last longer.

"Really?" he asks.

"Look at you." She laughs. A hand plunges below as if to pluck something from his crouch. But he's faster. So she settles for tracing circles around his abdomen. Her other hand fetches a flagon from the table. She nods to Isley. "And your friend here has the strength of a hundred horses!"

"Closer to the truth than you think," Isley says.

But he hasn't been gone for three days to return to cheap talk. Gently brushing Ailsa aside, he produces from his cloak a pouch and several shredded pieces of paper.

Isley reads the intent in his face, and says: "Ailsa dear, why don't you get our good friend Raki something to eat."

Dismissed, she stalks away, pressing a finger to his chest. Raki thinks she has a small face and too-sharp nails. Now, with Isley all to himself, he talks.

"Is Priscilla well?"

"What do you think?" Isley reclines, like a giant feline, his eyes glowing through parted bangs. "She's in the room, away from all this filth."

He smoothens out the pouch. He fingers them, extracting a handful of Yoki-suppressant pills, as if they were gold coins.

"That's quite a haul."

"As you've taught me, go for the handlers. But I prefer theft to murder."

Isley grins. "I didn't teach you to be a common thief. Remember that."

"And these orders," Raki points to the papers. "There's something there I don't understand –"

When Isley reads them, his eyes flicker with concern. He almost speaks. But Ailsa returns. Her idea of something to eat is a boiled leg of some unfortunate mammal and yet another flagon of mead. She holds them as she straddles Raki's left leg. She curls her hands behind his head. He finds Isley's brooding face replaced by her bosom.

As he peers behind her, he sees Isley makes his leave. He takes the pouch and the papers. Raki thinks he is going to give Priscilla a dose of yoki-suppressant tonight. Just in case, he mouths to him – and he disappears into the black belly of the tavern.

"Now, where were we?" Ailsa goes.

Warmth blooms into his thighs. She touches his nose with hers, planting her arms astride his shoulders. But facing this girl with hay-coloured hair, Raki is forced to think of someone else. He remembers staring face to face with her too, the forest around them, a grove of trees like a protective shield. He tries to remember.

Instead, he looks beyond her, to the window, to the darkness he has just escaped from, to the orange sunset leaking from behind the trees. He tries to summon the memory of that someone else to reassure himself he still remembers her. But just then, the night drowns out all the last remains of day.

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><p><strong>2.<strong>

Isley and Priscilla stay in an adjacent room, so all through the night Raki has Ailsa to himself. But he sends her away when, after several rounds, she insists on showing him the many other ways men from town pleasure her.

He locks the door after her and stretches out on the bed. It feels much more comfortable with just him on it. He still can taste her tongue on his lips, a barley-flavoured tang of old mead, and sheets are encrusted with hours of their accumulated sweat. But he lets his mind revert back to the grove of trees on that crumbling hillside. He can recall the clicking of rocks under his feet, a carpet of granite fragments leading away from where somebody, someone familiar had turned away from him. He remembers everything about that moment – even how thinking of it now in the empty hole of his room makes his heart ascend – everything. But the face of the person there.

He sleeps in, until Isley politely knocks on the door. He tells him that Ailsa's gone and it's morning and they have to go.

"You saw her leave?"

"Eh **you** sent her away."

"So you saw her leave?" Raki says.

In the single sword of sunlight slicing in through the brown-edged curtains he sees Isley's eyes narrow. But when he blinks and gets up, the frown is gone.

"I need a bath first," he says, throwing out his soiled shirt "Why don't you go and prepare breakfast first?"

Isley shrugs. "You and your baths."

He soaks in the soapy water just because he wants to feel clean, to flush away all the last two days' of travelling from his body. He picks the shards of gravel clean from between his toes, the coal black grit from under his fingernails. As he eases into the white soapwort lather, he feels the fatigue ease from his shoulders. Then he thinks of the next journey, across wild country, to wherever Isley will lead them.

And where are they going next, anyway?

Drying his hair, a young girl waits patiently on his bed. The sunlight makes her shoulder-length hair the colour of roasted chestnuts.

"Did you drown? Did you meet some monster underneath the water?" she asks.

Raki takes her into his arms, and kisses her forehead. Her mouth edges into a smile. He feels her shoulder blades, as sharp as daggers, against his chest, and the way she always presses her palms around his right hand when he returns. He listens to her breathing. When he breaks the embrace, he sizes her up. As usual, she always looks thinner.

"Please don't ask me if I've taken the pills," she says, and strolls out the door. He can hear her voice trailing from the depths of the tavern rooms: "We're waiting to feed you."

Feeling cleansed, he follows Priscilla down to the deserted hall. Isley sits alone at a table, away from the bars of sunlight punching through windows at every angle. He sees exhausted or sleeping patrons slump over tables, like corpses, with mead bleeding from their overturned flagons. Outside the half-open door, Raki doesn't hear the town stirring to life.

Raki sits, and Isley gestures to a steaming bowl of brown porridge and chamomile tea. "Eat something. We have a long way to go."

"Where are we going?"

"North."

"It's a bit early to take cover in the mountains."

"We're not going there."

"How far north?"

Isley crosses and uncrosses his legs, strokes the braids on Priscilla's hair. "We're heading towards Pieta."

Raki stops. He looks to Isley, noticing the smirk, noticing his eyes examining him. He knows that was deliberate, to see how he would react. He even sees Priscilla turned towards him, looking at him directly.

"You remember Pieta?"

"It's been years but I can remember."

"You'll get a chance to pay your respects."

Raki feels his legs grow tense, the muscles just above his thighs twitching, as if he can still feel the girl from last night sitting on them. He thinks of the shattered buildings, kneeling in half-melted snow. He thinks of the three of them walking amongst the ruins. But most of all, he thinks of the warriors' swords, perched in the ground, like a flock of desolate birds on a lonely landscape. He tries to recall the symbols on the swords.

"I told you before, she isn't there."

"Of course not," Isley says.

"Isley." Priscilla begins. "Don't."

"Let him dream on," he waves a hand, pulls his cloak tight. "Dreams are good."

He ignores Isley. Instead, he plays with the thought of returning to Pieta, to the graveyard where he stubbornly believes she isn't buried. He never liked the place. But he knows the story of Pieta like everyone else, how the retelling of its last days have acquired the status of hushed whispering and quiet respect, the kind of stories people tell in taverns. After all, Raki reasons, Isley probably had something to do with it.

As he sips his tea, he finds that the chamomile has a heavy, rusty taste invading its sweetness. He moves his hands to his mouth, then sees the crescent of blood on the lip of cup. Instinctively he returns to his mouth, only to realise he isn't bleeding.

He looks to Priscilla, who herself takes a sip of the tea, then to Isley. Behind his mentor, he sees the hollow insides of the tavern, in its reddish shadow, protected from the glare of morning light.

"Isley, where is everyone?" Raki asks.

When he receives no reply, he makes a move to get up and check on the men he had previously thought knocked out from the night of heavy drinking. But something in Isley's face, again the narrowing of his eyes, discourages him.

Raki tries again. "Isley, what did you do last night?"

Isley shrugs.

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><p><strong>3.<strong>

Raki helps Priscilla with her cloak. It's getting too big for her. He folds the top around her shoulders, drapes the hood till all he can see is arching bridge of her nose.

"Did Isley try to feed you?" Raki asks, keeping his voice low.

She shakes her head, wriggling her hand up to her forehead to adjust the hood.

He lets his hand linger on her a moment longer than usual. But she smiles and touches his hand, her fingers so small they feel like an infant's curling around his thumb. He wants to imagine that this is who Priscilla is: her memory nothing but their travels, her vulnerability something he can take the effort to protect, her quiet thoughtfulness the essence of her character.

But he knows better.

He keeps the yoki-suppressant pills in the pouch fastened to his belt, opposite to his dagger, the only weapon he carries while on long journeys. Isley carries the sword. After all, with Isley around, he knows there isn't much need for armament.

He fastens his own cloak, pulling tight the stray ends around his arms and adjusting the keffiyeh around his neck. In his room, he leaves behind his old clothes. A habit, he believes, which helps him move forward. He empties the water in his bath, checks the room to see has not left anything behind.

He exits the tavern latest. Before departing, he goes to where he and Isley sat the night before and empties enough silver to pay for their stay. He arranges them into a neat pile. To pay for something – at least it's honest, he thinks. At least it reminds him he is still, after all, human.

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><p><strong>4.<strong>

They walk through the deserted town. A town like this, Raki thinks, should be chaos in the morning: women screaming at other women, boys fetching animals, people getting about their work. But everything's just like the night before. Windows screech on their hinges. Wind sings through unlocked doors. The gate leading out of the village, where surely there should've been night watchmen, dangles ajar like a loose tooth. Rectangles of fresh earth dot the ground leading out of the town.

Raki knows that people have a habit of disappearing in Isley's presence.

Still, he follows, as they head north along a well-taken road. On both sides of the road, fields show early signs of the summer, their honey-coloured barley crop flickering in the sun as far as the eye can see. Petals on flowers flash at him like pink tongues. Above, a cloudless sky allows him to see into the green mist of hills and more hills.

He expects the trip to take at least five days. He tries to second-guess what Isley will do in the meantime. He knows Isley's unusual travelling habits: his preference to stopover in towns rather than by the roadside during evening, his non-avoidance of warrior patrols, and his almost-magnetic fondness for the north.

"Isley, why are we going north this time?" he asks, speaking to Isley's back.

He looks vertically upwards, as Raki has seen him do many times, as if he'd just asked a question too simple to explain. So Raki clarifies it.

"I mean, why are you bringing us pass Pieta?"

"You're not excited?"

"That's beside the point."

"To put it simply," Isley says. "I'm meeting some old friends in the north."

"Why now?"

Then Priscilla adds in: "Are they Awakened Beings?"

At this, Isley doesn't stop or flinch. He continues walking, staring straight ahead at the twisting road through the hills and plains. He doesn't answer the question either. Raki tries to catch Priscilla's eye, because she's right.

The questions build up in Raki's head as they settle into a self-imposed silence. To ease himself from doubting his mentor and friend too much, his hands stray to the dagger at his right. He grasps its sheath, thinks about the questions and jogs forward to match pace with Isley.

"You're not going to tell us anything, aren't you?" he asks.

If Isley has become weary with his questioning, Raki thinks he's hiding it well. Because he sees him pull his face into that trademark grin and say, with a patient finality: "You'll see."

But Raki counters: "You really saw her leave the tavern this morning?"

He finds himself satisfied that it is Isley who is now confused. "Who?"

"Ailsa."

"Who's - ?" Then Isley grins again. "Ah. You mean, the harlot."

"Priscilla doesn't need to hear that language."

"Did I see her leave, you say?"

Isley takes to staring straight ahead again. Raki dislikes this. It reminds him of their early days training together, when he would be sparring with Isley and nothing he did could make him blink an eyelid. He dislikes this because he knows it's Isley's way of saying, what you're doing doesn't matter to me.

"Which direction did she go?" Raki asks. "Well? You didn't do anything to her, right?"

"Nothing you already don't know," he says, and Isley runs his tongue over his lips.

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><p><strong>5.<strong>

As Raki expects, Isley plans, travels and knows the terrain in a way that he can only admire. They reach towns before sunset every day, without fail. They sleep with a roof over their head every night. Even though he consumes hardly anything, Raki knows he will be up with him for breakfast before their next day's trip. When they run into the Organization's warriors at some of their stopovers, Raki doesn't need to say anything, because Isley himself calmly ignores their presence.

Being in towns means Isley does not practice, and Raki takes the hint, so he does not do any sparring either. Instead, for the first time in a while, Raki spends the short period before turning in talking to people at the taverns and inns, being around humans who worry about human things like their harvests and their wives. It closes memories he'd rather forget from previous months, when the only fellow humans he talked with were harlots Isley hired.

But, returning to his bed at a quiet inn one night, Priscilla says: "It must be nice to remember things."

It's been six days on the road, and outside Raki sees nothing but mountains, the defences of the northern lands. They look to him like the outline of a giant's shoulders in the dark. Priscilla sits by the open window, her hood finally pulled back, the wind tugging at stray strands of hair.

"Not all the time."

"But you remember the things that count," she tries. "Like your Clare."

She's very lucid today, he thinks. He catches sight of the crushed yoki-suppressants, their powdery black residue which she takes with water at Isley's insistence. Then he pauses: it's only the second time she's mentioned Clare.

"You remember."

"Would you like me to tell you what you said?" she says. "Would you like me to help you remember?"

He isn't sure about this. He sees Priscilla's glazed-over eyes, her dredging deep into her own memory to resurrect something he said years ago isn't the kind of conversation he likes before he goes to bed. But before he can say no, Priscilla is already talking.

He sits, plants his head against the wall. Years on and roles are reversed, he thinks, because it's as if Priscilla's telling him the story, and he's listening, trying to recall something.

As Priscilla speaks, the details begin to emerge from the dark. A figure seated across the licking flames of a fire, glowing as if haloed. Fragments of Hogweed flowers clinging to a pair of speckled, and a hand reaching down to brush them away. A hand, knuckles showing, white, like a claw, pushing the side of his face towards a face –

Years and days with too many other women have bleached that face from his memory. Instead, he finds it replaced with an airy whiteness, like a blizzard. And while Priscilla continues talking, he can't go any further. When he looks past her, the missing images get edged with black: mountains, hills, the deep valleys surrounding Pieta, where everything – Clare, his old stories, perhaps hope – ends.

When there's nothing for him to do but close his eyes to sleep, to douse that empty white with darkness.

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><p><strong><em>NOTES: <em>**

Part Two will be uploaded in a couple of days after I do a bit of tweaking. This story will deal with a bit more dialogue.

Question: after reading this chapter, what impressions do you have of Raki, Isley & Priscilla? Do they meet with what you understand in canon?

Thanks for reading (and answering the question, if you did). I'll help me plan later stories.

Edit: _25 Sep 2011_


	2. Black

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**FACE** _(continued)_

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><p>DISCLAIMER: Claymore &amp; its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi &amp; his affiliates.<p>

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><p>Part Two - <strong>BLACK<strong>

**6.**

The road leads down into the last valley before the ruins of Pieta. Here, it narrows till it passes onto higher grounds. Woods flank the road like walls along a corridor. Here, for the first time during the journey, does Raki know that they are being watched.

Isley didn't train me for nothing, he thinks, his hand flirting with the temptation to draw his weapon. But he's stopped by something else: that both Isley and Priscilla know too, and both choose not to do anything about it.

At the crest of the valley he sees two men. They wait in the middle of the road. Too obvious. Raki thinks they're either looking for trouble or looking for someone. Yet Isley keeps walking, closing the distance, as if both men were permanent fixtures in the landscape.

"Isley?"

He hears him sigh. Then he turns to Priscilla, addressing her like how one would talk to a very small child:

"I want you to wait here while I talk to these gentlemen. Understand?"

Raki waits to be asked forward. But he sees Isley turn to him and say: "Why don't you replenish our food and water?"

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><p><strong>7.<strong>

"Who do you think they are?" Priscilla asks him, when he returns.

He had taken their water pouches – leather-skinned and hardly drunk anyway – down to the nearest stream. He emptied everything, refilled them, dumped the bits of food he hadn't already thrown away. He had left Priscilla there, waiting at the foot of the rise while Isley met at the summit. He wasn't sure what he was expecting when he had returned.

Against the backdrop of cloud and sky, Raki watches sunlight illustrate out their features. They could pass as farmers. Perhaps even bandits. But he knows: no human would ever approach Isley with such military restraint, with their eyes directed at his. He eyes their lack of weapons, the way they loosen their muscles, the polished frowns on their faces when they pause for Isley to respond to them. He knows: they answer only to Isley. He thinks they are the remnants of Isley's old marauding army.

"His former men."

He sees Priscilla frown.

"They're anxious," she declares.

"I can see that too."

"No. All three of them."

He sees her with her eyes closed, one hand out, palm up. A single lock of hair has fallen across her face. It flows absently across her lips.

"Can you hear what they're talking about?" he asks, pressing.

"He's giving orders."

For a strangled moment, Raki sees one of the men's eyes warp beyond Isley's frame and connect with his own. The man's expression hardens, and he can see the animal-like edge to the narrow eyes and the slit sides of his mouth. He can almost imagine the Awakened form of this man. The man appears to bark in protest at something Isley says, before softening with a dog-like obedience.

"He's talking about us," Priscilla announces.

Raki feels his frame tighten. He isn't sure about so many things, and this isn't something he wishes to add to his list of worries. He eyes the clouds, splitting light, behind the men. Again, like during their conversation in the tavern days ago, he feels the muscles in his legs clench. He drills a fist into his jutting kneecap. It disappears.

Then he sees Isley hand over the papers to the two men.

On the dusty trail, a thundercloud rapidly approaching from the south, Raki thinks he finally understands. He thinks he knows his – their situation. He looks at Priscilla who, to his surprise, nods. He turns his back on Isley's meeting, and says:

"I think that the time has come for us to make a choice."

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><p><strong>8.<strong>

As he expects, Isley doesn't tell him what he talked about in detail. He simply says they were old friends, who had arranged to meet long before. When Raki tries to get more out, he adds:

"Old warriors-in-arms," Isley gathers his directions. "They asked about you and Priscilla. But I told them if they spoke another word about you, I would've not let them leave here alive."

Isley smiles, and Raki finds the soreness in his muscles develop into a beating, lingering pain. He sneaks a hand down to massage the flat plateau behind his knees again. He knows this is the kind of phantom pain that has been with him for years. The leftover strain from all the training with Isley, from having his human frame pushed to its limits.

But he knows better: his pain will be nothing compared to what he'll feel when he reaches Pieta. And he knows too that Isley, who has begun to walk away, is always – somehow – the centre of this discomfort.

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><p><strong>9.<strong>

Raki thinks Pieta looks different in summer. The road leading to the desolate city splits off from the main route, sloping down into yet another valley swamped by shell-green grass as far as his eyes can see. At the highest point before hitting the slope, he can finally see it: the grey smudge of a town sprawled below, cuddled in the elbow of a meandering stream like a horizontal cut on the landscape.

They stop so he can eat. Raki eats, Isley takes a swig of water, Priscilla stares. There's no snow, no blizzard. There's no blasting, coughing wind. Instead, Raki finds the air strangely still. Storm clouds loiter above the town, but they are blurred across the sky by the time they reach the bottom of the valley. In their place, hangs the shallowness of a sea-blue sky, laced with clouds and the watery yolk of the sun. Raki has never seen the north so beautiful before.

But as they near the ruins, he feels that familiar atmosphere again. It's the absence of movement, the stillness of the surroundings, with nothing but the destroyed town. The sense that something terrible happened here all those years ago.

They pass through the front gate, its stone columns smothered by weeds. Moss blossoms on the buildings, like colourful wounds on their stone bodies. The afternoon sun plays with Raki's eyes, casting floating shadows under the empty husks of all the ruined buildings. To him, the spreading black along the edges of the blasted and potholed street looks suspiciously like blood.

Priscilla falls back. Raki sees her eyes closed again. The air is filled with the scent of fresh grass, stagnant water and something else. He knows it's the sense of decay.

He walks towards the monument waiting behind the next cluster of buildings. Isley glances around, and begins to speak:

"People say that the Organization had never lost so many warriors before in one place," he says. "And nobody had seen so many Awakened Beings dead among them."

"You'll know it better than most."

Raki sees Isley smile, too politely. "Have you discovered something I don't know?"

"You probably knew exactly how many Awakened Beings were here on that night."

"Ah. And how would you know that?"

When he doesn't answer, Isley softens, his smile melting away.

"Raki, you mind telling me what you think you know?"

Raki looks to the taller man. He makes an elaborate shrug, and says:

"Nothing you already don't know."

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><p><strong>10.<strong>

At the first sight of the memorial, Raki feels something spreading over his chest. Something – nostalgia, perhaps. Or dread. Or grief.

He remembers the last time he was here: winter, a storm and their cloaks waving to each other across the cold square. He remembers seeing the blades for the first time and how, listening to Isley's opinion, he had poured his tears over the swords. He could only be separated by Isley's insistence that he'd freeze to death if he didn't move.

That was years ago, Raki thinks. Now, as he breaks into the square, he sees the blades, like tombstones, distributed haphazardly on a carpet of quivering pasture. He wades through the knee-high grass. Flowers, blood-red poppies like open sores, seize his trousers as he brushes past them. The blades have turned dull-coloured. Some have been overwhelmed by vines.

And roughly at the centre of the scattered blades lies a heap of stones. He remembers building it. Now, years on, he plucks a rock from the grass and lays it on the summit his makeshift monument.

He goes to the farthest blade. It is tilted and rusty, lying in a yellow blush of sunlight. There, he kneels. He rights the blade with some effort. He images the warrior who last held it. He rests his head on the vertical steel. He closes his eyes. He pictures Clare.

Her face, chewed away from his memory, fails to appear.

Behind, in mumbled tones, he hears Isley talking to Priscilla. He can't hear the words exactly, but he can make out the strain in his voice. Instead, he listens to Priscilla's footsteps, departing.

Raki hears her say to Isley: "I wish you would stop treating me like a little girl."

Then, he knows – feels – Isley approaching him. The two of them are alone on this deserted square of land, accompanied by an audience of unused swords.

Isley's voice hits him like a smack of thunder:

"So you knew."

Raki sees the open plain through the stripped-down walls and cratered buildings. The shadows of clouds stamp shapes on the land. Green smears the hills beyond them. He can hear wind slicing through the fingers and splinters of stone left from the nearest building. He touches the large blade. He makes no attempt to stand.

"I think I've said this before," Raki says. "But she saved me."

"Uh huh."

"And after all these years I can even remember how she looks like."

"Time does that."

"So she could be buried here. I won't even know."

"What's her name again?"

"Clare."

"I don't remember."

"You were here, weren't you?"

He hears Isley walk closer, and turns to face him. Like that short interval at the tavern, like the first time he disarmed him, Isley doesn't look him in the face. His fringe shrouds his eyes. He stands with shoulders squared.

"But back to the question," says Isley. "Why don't you tell me what you know?"

"I think I know enough."

"Really?"

"Pieta. The massacre. The warriors who died."

"That's a bit vague."

Raki explains: "You ordered your army to wipe out the town. And you're still giving orders because of a new creature the Organization has come up with."

"Ah that's – so you know about the Eaters."

"You can't carry a piece of paper for two days without reading it."

"Then you probably should know what's next."

He doesn't. But when he sees Isley draw the blade and lean on it like a walking stick, he thinks he might.

"I think it's time to complete your training," Isley tells him.

Raki takes a deep breath.

"A human travelling with two Awakened Beings, isn't going to survive when the Eaters tracks us down."

"Your point?"

"Getting there," Isley swings the blade. It is massive, almost bigger than a Claymore. But he sees how it lands with a smack in Isley's other hand. He repeats it, flinging the blade in blurry arc. A blatant display of strength. "My men thought I'd gone crazy. Wanted to know what a human was doing with the White Silver King."

"That's what they called you?"

"It was a nice title."

"Why not tell them you're not fighting anymore?" Raki answers back. "Why not tell them you're with us? Not with them?"

Isley slaps the blade into his palm. The sound breaks off from the surrounding buildings. Raki notices: his eyelids curl behind his bangs, and he turns very still, as if he's deep in thought.

But he speaks: "I told them when we meet next, the human will be one of them."

Raki understands. The blade, Priscilla's dismissal, Pieta. Isley's investment in his training. Everything.

"What if I refuse?"

"I don't want to do this by force."

"What? Cut me up?"

"I've done this before," Isley says. Finally, he brushes his hair away, and Raki sees those eyes, full of intent. "It hurts less than the real thing."

Raki sighs. He knows this could be it. He knows that, from now, every move would be a wrong move. He wants to plead, to run close the distance and embrace this man, his brother, who is bound by his own actions to hopeless cause. But he doesn't. Instead, he turns, faces the Claymore's sword.

He kneels. He prays. He's only prayed once before, for Clare. So he repeats that prayer now.

In the middle of it, Isley's voice:

"I just realized something."

Raki continues to pray, rushing to end with Clare's name on his lips.

"You've known all this while?"

Raki nods.

"That's a lot of time. To plan. To tell Priscilla."

Raki gives Isley another nod.

When he gets to his feet, he sees Isley's face, no longer confident. The sword, however, still remains firmly in his hands.

"So are you going to ambush me with something?" Isley asks. He looks around. "Like one of your self-learnt moves?"

"You took a drink before we arrived at Pieta."

"Go on."

Raki takes the pouch from his side. He feels its lightness. When he lifts it up with his left hand, Isley seems to understand. For effect, he draws his dagger with other hand.

"Where do you think all the pills went into?"

For a second, Isley's face hangs suspended in surprise. But he breaks into a smile. It makes Raki more uneasy than he already is.

"Very smart of you."

Raki shrugs.

"You forgot I'm the better swordsman."

Then, a voice: "You forgot about me."

Priscilla strides into their midst, and then things happen very fast. Isley moves his sword-arm. She stops it. Raki sees Isley's instinctive reaction: he tries to protect himself with his other arm. It cuts through the air, chopping. But before it connects with Priscilla's face, he's on the ground. Priscilla flexes the arm under her. It snaps. It twists outward at an obtuse angle.

"Wait!"

Both pause. But Isley struggles to stand. Raki sees Priscilla apply pressure. He lets out a painful shout. It's the first time he sees him in agony.

"Priscilla! Stop!" Raki finds himself saying.

"Let him stand."

She looks up at him. Unsure, but she still obeys anyway. Raki helps Isley stand, but holds the dagger close.

"You planned this," Isley pants.

"Yes." He aims the blade at Isley, who's clutching his broken arm, struggling. Raki hesitates. He's reviews the sight of this man before him. This man: Isley. Not just any man, but the man who taught him to hold a sword properly.

But Raki says what he's been wanting to say all this time: "Show me she isn't buried here."

Isley stops. He looks at the Claymore's swords, his gaze flying back and forth through them.

"I think your obsession with that warrior has made you crazy –"

Raki puts the dagger in the centre of his forehead, and orders:

"Dig them all out. And show me."

* * *

><p><strong>11.<strong>

Raki measures their shadows. As the sun drags itself across the entire length of sky above Pieta, their shadows get pulled towards it. They merge with those from the ruins, pooling in a mass of dark colour along straight fragments of stone and debris. At one point of the day, Raki turns to find the sun at its brightest, an orange flower made luminous by the hills crowding around its descending form.

Isley has exposed the seventeen shallow graves beneath the blades. His face is mucked with soil, his arms bloodied with dirt. Raki examines them. Nothing. Years of winter storms and summer humidity have eroded the warriors' symbols at the hilts. The skulls that stare back at him mouth at some inner pain he can't interpret.

"Recognize anyone?" Isley says, goading.

Raki presses hard on the hilt of the sword he took from Isley. He thinks: there's nothing to prove that she's here. There's nothing to prove she isn't

Raki walks up to Isley. He makes sure the blade is pointed at the taller man's neck. He knows there's no possibility of a good answer, but he asks anyway.

"You don't remember anyone named Clare?"

"Can we stop playing games?" he says. Then whispers: "Listen Raki, put down the sword and let's talk. I know what you're thinking. But you don't want to be alone with a monster –"

Priscilla: "What's he saying?"

"You think just a few years of swordsmanship is good enough when she awakens?" he says. Raki endures this, till Isley moves closer, his butcher shop breath filling the narrow space between them. "And she will awaken – it's just a matter of time –"

"Raki, I don't think you should listen to what he's saying."

In Isley's face he tries to pry free any memory, any hint of Clare's face. He tries to see the ridge of her forehead, the sloping hair, the way sweat perches like a mustache on the upper reaches of her lips – he sees the shaky way she swings her large sword, the rustling of many muscles when she jumps. He can't stop thinking. And he knows it.

"She's alive," he says. Isley's face breaks out in exasperation. "I'm going to find her."

"Good. Now let's –"

He holds up a hand to stop Isley from talking, then points at the nearest grave, where the bones of a dead warrior look like a curled fingers of an open palm.

Isley appears to understand. But, he raises his hands, and says: "Raki, I trained you –"

"I know."

"I taught you everything you need to know."

He nods.

"You can't do this! Leaving me for a monster –"

He lands the first blow lands on Isley's temple, so fast that he hears the wind of his retracting fist. As his former friend and mentor stumbles, he thrusts up the flat of the blade at him. Isley shouts, but the blow muffles it. Isley crumples, his legs bend and he crashes into the open grave. The last Raki sees of the white silver king is a folded man clutching the side of his face, his long hair speckled with bloodstains.

* * *

><p><strong>12.<strong>

"Raki, are you all right?"

Evening falls. All he wants is to get out of here, to exit the valley with its ruins, graves and wounded man he's left in one of the graves. He walks to where his memory triggers a route, skirting the stream, climbing the slopes till the wind comes at him, gusts punching into his face. As the orange remnants of sunset drip away from the horizon, he continues walking, darkness coating him like a blanket.

He hears Priscilla walking behind. Her footsteps fall like whispers. He's grateful for the space she gives him. But soon, whether he likes it or not, he will have to face her, face the truth of who she is, and his own frailty in the face of greater things.

He gropes in the dark. His feet strike rocks and bounders, and the huge sword he took from Isley catches the weedy arms of plants more than once. Ahead, he stares down an intense darkness, so black he imagines fires, colours, spaces on it. Somewhere beyond it, he knows, is the Central lands, his home, the trails he's familiar with, and everything he's hoping for,

"Raki?" Priscilla again. "Where are we going?"

In the thick nothingness, he tries – again – to reassemble that face once for all. He sees the ripped knuckles of a closed fist. Then an inverted tick of blood trailing downwards from a busted lip. Hair brushing shoulders, its ends sharp, as if hacked by a machete. The sound of breathing, drenching from the very bottom of lungs –

His own. Filling the space around him and Priscilla. In the absence of a face, the darkness swallows, and pulls him forward. He wants to tell Priscilla, this where we're going. Forward.

He takes steps after step, closes his eyes. And before he knows it, he can't tell the difference at all.

.

.

_END_

* * *

><p><strong>NOTES: <strong>_This is one of those stories that took a lot of energy to write. I had to imagine every bad thing & grudge about my closest friends to write the dialogue between Raki and Isley in this chapter. Another crazy example of how fiction and real life impact & inspire each other._

_My only regret is that I didn't use Priscilla a lot as a character in this story. It became a bit too much about Raki & Isley, with Priscilla becoming the saintly third-character. _

_Even though the number of reviews tell reviews a different story, I'm just glad to post this, to contribute to an already flagging fandom. But do leave a review so I know whether or not my writing's just plain nonsense or something you'd actually read._

_And thank you for reading this. _

10.10.2011


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